How Much Can You Replace Before It's Not the Same Boat? : Career Growth

At Riva, they care which direction the screws are pointing. All of them.

The Italian boatbuilder is famous for those beautiful mahogany speedboats that look like they should have George Clooney in them even when they don't. The Aquarama, introduced in 1962, became the most famous, but Riva had been building boats long before that. Their wooden boats were obsessively finished then, and apparently nobody has told them they can stop.

Riva says the wooden parts on its boats still go through 24 varnishing steps by hand. The screws are positioned in the same direction. Even the screw heads are painted to match the hull. There is craftsmanship, and then there is making sure every screw is facing the same way. I appreciate this mostly because I have definitely installed things in our house with whatever screw happened to be closest to me.

But old wooden boats create a problem. They are made of wood. Wood and water have a complicated relationship. Engines wear out, upholstery cracks, hardware corrodes. Things that spend sixty years bouncing around on lakes and oceans eventually need more than another coat of varnish.

Riva has an entire restoration division for this. Carpenters, mechanics, painters and finishers work on old boats, repairing what needs repairing while trying to preserve what made the boat a Riva in the first place. The company describes the goal as restoring the boat while keeping its spirit intact.

Which raises a question that has apparently bothered people for a couple thousand years: How much of the boat can you replace before it's not the same boat anymore?

The ancient version is called the Ship of Theseus. The basic idea is simple. A wooden ship gets old, so one rotten plank is replaced. Obviously, it's still the same ship. Later, another plank needs replacing. Still the same ship. Keep doing this long enough, though, and eventually every original plank has been replaced. Now what? Is it still the Ship of Theseus?

Philosophers have managed to make this considerably more complicated, as philosophers will, but that's the part I like. Most of us aren't particularly bothered by the first plank. It's obviously the same ship. The trouble starts when we look around and realize how much has changed.

Kathryn has been going through a version of this lately. She's spent years building a business in which certain jobs weren't hers anymore. Then things changed, as things tend to do, and some of those jobs landed back on her desk. Her reaction has basically been, I thought I was past this.

At one point she called it a demotion. I disagreed. This went over about as well as you'd expect.

But I think the Ship of Theseus is on my side.

Twenty years into a career, you aren't the same collection of parts you started with. You know things you didn't know. You've made mistakes you hopefully don't make anymore and developed entirely new and exciting mistakes to replace them. Your judgment changes. Your standards change. The work you're good at changes. So does the work you're willing to tolerate.

People come and go. Systems get built. Systems fail. Responsibilities move around. One day something you haven't done in years ends up back in front of you, and suddenly that one old plank gets a remarkable amount of power. We look at it and think, I'm back where I started.

But you're not. The plank might be familiar. The ship isn't.

I think this is one of the stranger things about getting older, or more experienced, or whatever phrase we're using to avoid saying older. We expect progress to remove things from our lives permanently. Once something has been conquered, delegated, solved or survived, we'd prefer it remain behind us.

That's not really how anything works. Sometimes you get the old problem again. You're just not the old person solving it.

That distinction is easy to miss when you're annoyed. And Kathryn was annoyed. She can do the jobs that came back. That's almost beside the point. What bothered her was what doing them seemed to say about everything she'd built since the last time they were hers.

I understand that part. I just don't think a career is defined by whichever plank you're replacing this week.

Which brings me back to those ridiculous, beautiful Italian boats. A classic Riva can go through decades of maintenance and restoration. Wood can be repaired. Mechanical parts can be rebuilt. Finishes can be stripped and applied again. Riva's own restoration program exists to do exactly that while preserving the identity of the boat.

The boat survives because people are willing to change what needs changing. And after all of that—new parts, old parts, repairs, restorations—there's one detail I keep coming back to.

The screws still point in the same direction.

FAQ

What is the Ship of Theseus?

The Ship of Theseus is an ancient philosophical thought experiment about identity and change. If the individual parts of a ship are gradually replaced over time, at what point—if any—does it stop being the same ship? Patrick uses the idea to explore what happens when the individual responsibilities and circumstances of a career change while the larger career continues.

Does taking back an old responsibility mean your career is going backward?

Not necessarily. An old responsibility can return because a person leaves, a system changes or a business enters a transition period. Performing a task you once delegated doesn't erase the experience, judgment or skills you've developed since you last performed it.

Why can career growth sometimes feel like going backward?

We often associate progress with permanently leaving certain responsibilities behind. When one of those responsibilities returns, it can feel like losing progress even though the larger career may have changed considerably. The task may be familiar without the person performing it—or the career surrounding it—being the same.

How does this apply to real estate agents?

Real estate careers don't always have a traditional promotion structure. An experienced agent may still perform activities they did early in their career, particularly during periods of hiring, rebuilding or changing business models. The return of an old task doesn't necessarily mean the agent has returned to an earlier stage of their career.

What can the Ship of Theseus teach us about business growth?

Businesses continually change their individual parts: people, systems, responsibilities, technology and processes. The Ship of Theseus raises a useful question about where the identity of a business actually resides when those components change. Growth may involve replacing or revisiting individual parts without erasing everything that came before.